An exercise in RIX Sealed

I took a brief break from Standard to get at least some Sealed practice in before Grand Prix London this weekend. My first pool wasn’t very interesting as BG with Vraska, Relic Seeker and Ravenous Chupacabra was quite the obvious choice. Today I will go over my second pool which was quite a bit trickier. Here is what I opened.

I always start with sorting by rarity to get see what my most powerful cards are. Curve and average card quality certainly matters but if you have a Tetzimoc, Primal Death in your pool and choose to play a RW deck, you are almost certainly making a mistake.

In this case the rarity sort reveals two rare equipments, 3 white cards and a black card. Vampires are my favorite tribe in Ixalan so we’re off to a good start. That is, until we sort by color and find that neither black nor white has that much to offer apart from the rares, which aren’t even that great. Nevertheless I started off looking at a BW deck and this is what I came up with.

This won’t do. I couldn’t find a 23rd card I would consider and there are already plenty of stinkers in the deck. The curve is low but the cards aren’t that aggressive so you’re both unlikely to run the opponent over and have too many low impact cards to expect to win a long game.

Instead let’s look at combinations that just contains either black or white since the Forsaken Sanctuary and Traveler’s Amulet will at least let us splash a rare or two. First up is GW.

We have cut all the bad black cards (and the few good ones) and the worst of the white cards. What we gain is a decent removal spell and some beefier creatures. With both Captain’s Hook and Jadecraft Artisan we should be able to attack into most board positions so we might be able to actually finish opponents off. I think this deck looks fine although I’m not quite sure of all the card choices. Maybe the third artisan should be in, and you could even consider playing New Horizons and maybe Blossom Dryad to include Vraska’s Contempt.

Next is what looks like a pretty classic UW Fliers deck. This archetype has been good at least as long as I have played Magic and this could work as well. The fliers are well equipped to wear hooks and there is both bounce spells and a counterspell, what’s not to like. Even if this isn’t the actual best possible build it looks like a blast to play, it is exactly what I enjoy in a limited deck (aside from bombs of course, bombs are the most fun you can have in limited).

This is just a worse UW deck to me. You get Vraska’s Contempt but your creatures get worse and I don’t see what this deck’s plan is. You have fewer fliers to win with and so it looks more like this deck is trying to grind at which point you’re just asking to get beaten by more powerful decks (which is pretty much all the decks you will be facing). At this point I’m ruling out black; there are just too few playables.

I don’t like the red in this pool but with the two Marauding Looter I figured I should at least give UR a chance. Ultimately I think this also ends up being a worse version of UW. The removal is worse and while Unfriendly Fire can go to the face there a fewer fliers so you don’t actually get more reach. Starting with a 2/2 on turn one can end up dealing a lot of damage but I think it happens to seldomly to make up for the lower card quality.

The UW build was the most appealing to me so I played a few matches with it and quickly learned that I had overvalued Elenda, the Dusk Rose. She joins a long list of powerful rares that lose out because they require too many things to go right. She takes a long time to get going, and if you’re behind, the opponent can just not offer up trades and then you need removal to trigger her. Even if you do get some creatures to die, you had better hope they aren’t playing blue, because then she might just get bounced and all your work will be undone. Add to that the fact that she is pretty easy to kill right away in which case she’s a 4 manaMartyr of Dusk.

I also played two matches with the GW deck and still felt unimpressed, so I decided to let go of white and tried the UR deck. Unfortunately I mulliganed both games and didn’t really get a good sense of how good the deck was.

That concluded my league and my overall impression is that the pool was quite bad. There weren’t any bombs and none of the colors were deep nor especially powerful. I have a feeling that the UR deck might be the best option but I am in no way certain. I would really love to hear your thoughts on this. Did I miss a good color combination? Which colors would you play, and would you build it differently than me (in particular in the case of a green deck)? Let me know and thanks for reading.

This year, Anders played his first Pro Tour in Albuquerque 2017. He has been on the Danish WMC team twice with Standard as his main focus since it's the most supported competitive format but Modern, Legacy and Sealed have been part of the diet now and then.